


Interregnum

by ncfan



Series: Fictober 2018 [12]
Category: Star vs. The Forces Of Evil
Genre: Canon Speculation, Eclipsa is forever ambiguous, Fictober 2018, Gen, Headcanon Autistic Character, Headcanon Autistic Star, POV Female Character, Set between S3 & S4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-08 03:32:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16421597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: "Your mother's really still missing, then?" [Written for Fictober 2018]





	Interregnum

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt, “I’ll tell you but you’re not gonna like it.” Also written because the S4 promo indicates that Eclipsa is in charge as of the beginning of Season 4, and I was wondering how that happened.

“Your mother’s really still missing, then?”

Star nodded, but even as she was having this conversation with Eclipsa, her eyes kept straying to the baby sleeping soundly in Eclipsa’s arms. Everything related to said baby was weird beyond weirdness, a weirdness scientists would have to invent a whole new scale to accommodate, but the sight of Meteora Butterfly sleeping peacefully topped all. Nothing about that girl was peaceful, but here she was, sleeping.

The sight of Eclipsa and Meteora like that, the way Eclipsa had made a home out of the broken-open Monster Temple, in spite of the damage and the ruin, to the point of slowly repairing the building, filled Star with a hollow feeling. It grated on the inside of her chest like sandpaper, like it would make her bleed if it rubbed against her too hard or too long. Or maybe the hollow feeling wasn’t coming from that, or wasn’t _just_ coming from that.

Star pushed the hollow feeling away to nod her head again. “Yeah, yeah. I’ve looked _everywhere_ , and I can’t find her.” She stared down at her hands, at the dirt caked under her fingernails and the rust-red scab on her right palm. “Mom’s just…” _Don’t say ‘gone.’_ “Not around.”

Her memories of the Realm of Magic were like a tapestry someone had left in their attic and not noticed when the moths and the mice and the whatever started munching on it. Tendrils of black in gold water. A laugh that in retrospect she recognized as her mom’s voice, though she’d never heard that note in her mom’s voice before. All those cute little baby unicorns. A thread of fear beneath the dull, foggy bliss.

These fragments of memory, Star kept trying to piece them together into a coherent story, something with a beginning, a middle, and an end, as opposed to just a heap of disjointed images with no start and no stop. Kept trying to figure out if she could have fought off the haze long enough to recognize her mom and get her to come home. But whenever she was close to an answer, it all flew away, and she spent so much time trying to corral those images and sensations that by the time they were back in their pen, she’d forgotten her place and had to start over.

Eclipsa sighed and shifted Meteora’s weight in her arms to retrieve her cup of black, earthy-tasting tea from the table. They were sitting in what Eclipsa called her parlor, and though they were seated on dusty cushions, the table under the lawn table cloth was of rough stone, and midday sunlight poured through a break in the wall high above them, it wasn’t half bad. Pretty cool, actually, though Star would be this place got pretty cold at night.

“That is worrisome,” Eclipsa said, her voice sort of caving on low notes.  “I’ve a hard time believing that Moon wouldn’t have already found her way back if everything was alright. She always seemed quite resourceful.”

Star nodded, trying not to fidget on her dusty blue cushion. There was something she was here to do, but her mind was going in many different directions the way it usually did, and it was hard to get there. She’d asked where Glossaryck was when she first got here, but Eclipsa had only shrugged and said that Glossaryck came and went as he pleased. A small pile of empty pudding cups was pressed into a corner, and that did provide some reassurance that he was here at least sometimes. Star hadn’t seen the wand. She didn’t ask about it.

While Star tried to reach the point she wanted to talk about, Eclipsa seemed to take her silence as license to go on talking. “I suppose that leaves you in charge.” Her pale, normally porcelain-smooth forehead scrunched up, and something glimmered wetly in her gray eyes. “I’m shocked you found the time to sneak away.”

In the end, she’d had to use the tunnels Eclipsa had shown her. Star shrugged, erratic energy racing under her skin. “Dad’s covering for me. I just wanted to give you an update.”

“Hmm.” Eclipsa frowned down into her teacup, her free hand going up to stroke the baby’s shock of silvery hair; Meteora twitched slightly, but did not stir. “But that’s not the only reason you’ve come, is it?”

“What? Why can’t it be?”

At that, Eclipsa smiled as if the two of them knew a secret shared by only them. The wet glimmer in her eye… Well, it didn’t leave entirely, but it was more of a twinkle, now, and was less disconcerting to look at. “Star. Dear. I remember being Queen. Moreover, I remember being Queen at precisely the age you are now. It was not especially pleasant, and one of the unpleasant things involved having so little time to myself that I took to staying up until two in the morning just so I could get some reading done.” She looked off, that smile curving upwards slightly. “Among other things. But those other things aren’t relevant to this conversation. What _is_ relevant is that I can’t imagine so much has changed in the last three hundred years that you would have any more free time than I did. So why come here yourself, when it would have been a better use of your time just to send a message on to me?”

Star felt a sudden urge to sink her teeth around something. Not to bite or tear, but just to gnaw on it. It was only at these times that she really regretted letting Eclipsa keep the wand; since receiving it, she’d always chewed on the bell when she felt the need to have her teeth clattering against something. Before then, it had been pens or the hilt of a knife or occasionally her hair, whatever was at hand. Mom _hated_ it when Star chewed on her hair, had tried for years to train her out of it, but now Star found herself winding her hair in one hand, barely resisting the urge to stuff a thick lock in her mouth. “I can tell you,” she said cautiously, “but you’re not gonna like it.”

A soft, slightly rumbling noise like a laugh, but not quite it, escaped Eclipsa’s mouth. “You’d better tell me, then. I understand the impulse to delay— _believe me_ , I do—but bad news only gets worse the more you delay telling it.”

Star sucked in a deep breath. This was it, then. “Okay.” She drummed her fingers on her knees, a sharp, rapping tattoo. “I need you to come back to the castle with me.”

Once the moment had arrived, Star had said it very quickly, and as tended to happen when she said something very quickly, she’d accidentally left something out. But though she wasn’t always sure of much when it came to Eclipsa, she was sure of two things. That she cared enough about Mewni to potentially kill her own kid to protect it (which was something Star was still reeling from, just a little bit, but she’d been right there, she’d heard everything they said to each other, and there was no denying what she’d seen or heard), and that she might not have had the best judgment in the world, but that she was about as far from an idiot as you could get.

Eclipsa was pretty sharp, and thus, even though Star didn’t say everything she wanted to say at the first, Eclipsa seemed to infer the rest with no problem.

Her face fell. Like, visibly fell, so obviously that Star for once had no trouble interpreting the expression. Eclipsa’s back and shoulders stiffened, her arm tightening around Meteora until the baby whimpered a little in her sleep and she, with visible difficulty, relaxed her grip. When she spoke, her voice taut as a guitar string fit to snap, she said, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Star. As you no doubt gathered, I am not especially popular in Mewni.” She stared off past Star, her jaw set and her eyes glinting with a hardness close to diamond. “When I renounced the throne, I meant that to be permanent. I don’t want it.”

“It’s not forever,” Star pleaded with her. “I _need_ to look for my mom, and I can’t do that with eleventy-hundred castle people breathing down my neck.” She picked at her hand as she went on, “Mom’s a bit of a micro-manager, and _nobody_ remembers what to do when there isn’t somebody giving them orders. They just follow me around like they’re little ducklings and I’m their mother; it’s _weird_!”

“What about your father?”

“Dad wants to go look for Mom, too, and he’ll probably go off by himself no matter _what_ I tell him.” And this was not easy to say, but it needed to be said; it was right in the middle of the road in front of her, and couldn’t be swerved away from. “Dad’s not great at this. I mean, he can cover for me for a few hours okay, but any longer than that and he’s just… _bad_.” There, she’d said it. “It’s not good, it’s really not good, and I need him to help me look for Mom. So you don’t have to go back there forever. I just need _someone_ to go and be the regent until I find Mom, and Mom’s relatives would be _awful_ , and I…” Star stared down at her hands. “…I need help. That’s all.”

Star kept staring down at her hands. Eye contact was difficult when she felt like this; it was easier to look somewhere, anywhere else. Eclipsa didn’t say anything, and Star didn’t know whether she was thinking it over or if she was just waiting for Star to look up to tell her ‘no.’ Both seemed equally likely.

But then, another hand moved into her field of vision, a slender hand not much larger than her own, and covered by a gray, silken glove. The ring on Eclipsa’s ring finger glittered as she covered one of Star’s hands with her own, and at last, Star looked up.

“Alright,” Eclipsa said gently, “I’ll come back with you. They’re not going to like it, you know.”

“The court doesn’t like _anything_ I do.”

“Neither will the Magical High Commission.”

“I don’t care what they think,” Star said flatly. “They can just deal with it.”

“Well, if that’s settled, just let me pack my things. I can leave now.”


End file.
